Economy of humour and horror: Mahesh, Mathematics and spectrality

Abstract

This paper examines the affective doublet of humour and horror in the Bengali ghost story, ‘Mahesher Mahajatra’ (‘Mahesh’s Funereal Journey’, 1930). I will track the affective transformation of horror into humour and vice versa in the aforementioned Bengali short story wherein the ghost is situated in relation to a dialectical interplay of western rational knowledge and native belief systems. I will foreground the dialectic of humour and horror as a specific modulation of the Bengali ghost narrative. I will be looking at the affective network of horror and humour by taking it through Indian classical rasa theory to make an argument on affective economy through the complex of multiple rasas that underline humour and horror. We will see how this affective economy has a relation to the trope of spectral economy at work in Rajshekhar Basu’s text.